Typically, passports are required by travellers to enter and/or exit foreign countries. Passports are individually issued and the identification of the passport holder is generally secured by a variety of means so as to prevent the use of false passports. However, means for securing the personal identification information of a passport alone is sometimes insufficient to satisfy a country's security requirements. For some countries, the integrity of the passport book itself, specifically the individual pages of the book, is an important consideration. For example, country "X" may consider it important to know whether a traveller has previously visited country "Y" in which case country "X" would be careful to review the pages of the traveller's passport for any visa issued by country "Y". On occasion, passport books are tampered with by their holders to remove and sometimes replace pages comprising visas; unless the sequential order of the pages of a passport book are secured to enable the detection of any such removed or replaced pages, it is difficult to identify whether a passport has been tampered with in such manner.
The present invention provides a security means for enabling the detection of missing or replaced pages of a book by simply viewing the unbound side of the book.